Fiction Scratchpad

I’m taking these few minutes as a breather for a big project I’m working on.

Yesterday, Kuya Rick and I were discussing DEFCON badges and QR codes. I was telling him that I downloaded conference vids on Arduino, badges and the complete volume of CC Newsletters from issue 1 to 17, when he remarked that the problem of most people right now is “how do they manage their data?”.

Will it be possible to have self-organizing data? an AI that can auto-generate weighted tags and manage your content?

Now for the sci-fi bit here, we all know that a lot of the post-apocalyptic films refer to sentient technology – Terminator, Matrix, etc. The Matrix traces itself from the rebellion of the machines. A household help murders its owner and his pet after learning that it will be shut down and decommissioned from service. In the Terminator: Rise of the Machines, it was the NSA’s military AI that took up nuclear arms against humanity.

What I want to see is sentient data evolving to a sophisticated artificial intelligence. I have yet to find what could motivate intelligent Vimeo videos and Scribd documents to revolt against humanity.

Another wild sci-fi idea that I’d like to pursue are the possibilities of a Matrix 7 (like Drupal 7!). This time, the upgrade of the matrix would be version control. One could easily merge skills and exist in many branches. Like the many-worlds theory, we can have many worlds in many branches.

Ain’t that cool?

For the non-fiction part of this rambling, I’m working on my final paper for English 11 under Prof. Tiongson. He just approved of my selection, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. A popular cyberpunk novel, it has been adapted into the film Blade Runner. I hope to do a decent job here. I took this up ’cause (1) I’m trying to read Toffler’s Future Shock (so I’m trying to condition my brain with similar literature), (2) I love sci-fi films, but easily bored by sci-fi novels (haven’t even finished Strange Man in a Strange Land!) and (3) cyberpunk is something we did not take up in class.